ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
Not only does Cooper’s perspectivism lead him to overestimate the merits of prescientific life, it leads him to underestimate the expressiveness of science itself. His
contention that science manifests an “obsession with naming things” leading to “a
rigidity in the use of words, and a hostility to imaginative, metaphorical speech” (CN:
87) has been convincingly refuted by Richard Dawkins in his book Unweaving the
Rainbow (1998), which showed how the naturalist uncovers rather than destroys
nature’s poetry. I am reminded especially of a beautiful passage in The Blind
Watchmaker in which Dawkins himself – just as Cooper’s sage does – blends
metaphor and truth in a tender insight into nature’s efflorescence:
It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of
my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air . .
. and the seeds are drifting outwards in all directions from the tree. Up and
down the canal, as far as my binoculars can reach, the water is white with
floating cottony flecks, and we can be sure that they have carpeted the ground
to much the same radius in other directions too . . . The whole performance,
cotton wool, catkins, tree and all, is in aid of one thing and one thing only, the
spreading of DNA around the countryside . . . It is raining instructions out
there; it’s raining programs; it’s raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading,
algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any
plainer if it were raining floppy disks. (1986: 111)
Most of all, Cooper’s anti-scientism doesn’t do justice to the naturalist’s sense of
immanent mystery. The notion of the Dao – with its profundity, oneness, transience,
efflorescence and wonder – is a lovely way of expressing what is deepest in the
evolutionary world-view. In this way, the Dao and its mystery redounds within nature,
not without. This, perhaps, is the “grandeur” which Darwin discerned when famously
contemplating a “tangled bank” at the end of the Origin of Species. Perhaps, indeed,
we evolved to love nature’s enchantments, as Nicholas Humphrey has intriguingly
speculated in Soul Dust (2010).
A further and related problem with Cooper’s perspectivism is that it doesn’t take the
facts of human nature seriously: we would be better off, Cooper says, if we avoided
reflecting on ourselves too much. He derides “the myth of an essential nature of self,
bequeathed by our hunter gatherer ancestors” (CN: 123) and reports that, in Daoism,
“spontaneity” is explicitly prized over “contrived, artificial, or calculating” behaviour;
that “human beings are ‘great’ and ‘on the way’ when they live spontaneously” (CN:
47); and that “the Zhuangzi compares a horse that, free to graze and gallop, manifests
its ‘true nature’ with another horse which has been broken, branded and bridled” (CN:
48). Yet the achievement of increasing self-knowledge and self-control is one of
humanity’s greatest; it is the driver of civilization’s ongoing flight from barbarism.
Moreover, as Cooper himself recognizes (in asserting that spontaneity is not about
“impulse and immediate passion,” or “actes gratuits” [CN: 77]), if we want to foster a
state of mindful convergence, we need to know how to outflank any other state which
might capture our behaviour. By ignoring human nature, we forgo the opportunity to
deliberately cultivate – whether through altering our attitudes or outside influences –
certain aspects of the human repertoire while minimizing others. Instead of, as it were,
gardening ourselves, we let mental weeds grow. Human nature conspires against our
better selves unless we expose and redress its machinations.
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